The Dark Beyond the Stars : A Novel (33 page)

“Explain.”

“We’re going into the Dark,” I said, and rattled off our inventories of water, basic food constituents, and, most important, the vital supplies of trace elements on board—elements we would have difficulty replacing if planetfalls were limited to one per generation or perhaps fewer. I slowed when his eyes began to glaze.

“You have a point, Sparrow?”

I took my courage in my hands and gambled.

“We can’t afford to lose their mass, sir.Or their trace elements.” Once they were back on board, I’d worry about saving their lives.

He had lost track of what I really had in mind.

“Whosemass?”

“Heron’s.And Noah’s and Tybalt’s .”

He folded his arms and leaned back in his hammock, trying to read the carefully blank expression on my face.

“Noah was a good friend of yours,” he said, too casually. “Am I right, Sparrow?”

I shrugged. “We played chess. He usually won. He talked about the mutiny with me. I refused to join it. But you know all about that, sir.”

He knew I had been approached. He also knew I had rejected the mutiny or, at worst, had temporized.

“And Tybalt ?”

“He was a good team leader,” I said cautiously. “But I… hardly respected his judgment down below.”

“And Heron?”The Captain was disbelieving. “You want to save the man who tried to kill you?”

I shrugged again.

“Eighty-five kilos of mass, standard distribution of elements.”I took a deep breath and played the last card I had. “To leave them behind might… endanger the
Astron.”
As Thrush had said, not even the Captain could do that.

His look terrified me but I kept my face frozen in an imbecilic expression of devotion to duty. After a long moment, he turned and floated to the port and its view of Outside.

“Take a team below and get them,” he said harshly.

I was out the hatch before he finished the sentence.

****

My down-below team consisted of Ophelia, Crow, and Abel, along with Grebe and Mercutio from Maintenance to act as porters—either made Banquo look small.

Noah and the others had been stranded on Aquinas II in the same area where Ophelia’s team was originally based. The weather was no better than before and our Lander had to fight to make it safely to the surface. Once again we settled down by the methane river and its surrounding cliffs. Mercutio assured us that Noah and the others had been abandoned there, but when we turned on the landing lights, there were no signs of them. Any tracks they might have left were covered by huge drifts of methane snow. After landing, it took time to prepare the sled and load the life-support supplies. Extra water, extra oxygen, plus emergency medical supplies in case Abel needed them before we got the three stranded crewmen back to the Lander. Full air tanks would last for four hours, and by my computations it had been a little more than three since I first approached Ophelia. We were running out of time.

“We’re on a fool’s errand,” Ophelia muttered.

It was my turn to say curtly, “Shut up.”

We loaded the Rover with sleds and supplies,then squeezed in after. We sat for a moment in silence, a tiny oasis of humanity on an alien world, searching for three companions condemned to death and stranded there. Only none of us had any idea where they might be.

Then I knew.

Grebe was at the controls and I tapped him lightly on the shoulder and said into my helmet microphone,

“Drive to the gorge.”

I had told Noah of my little valley with its thundering methane fall and how excited I was to be the only human in the universe to see it. On Aquinas II, it was one of probably very few areas where you could see more than a meter or two in front of your face. And I was sure it was one of the few places that might qualify as scenic.

“That’ll take half an hour,” Crow said, worried.

“Then we’ll have to hurry, won’t we?”

Everybody shut up then and we drove the two kilometers in silence. We located the gully, but it was impossible to get closer with the Rover. We quickly piled the extra oxygen cylinders on the sled and hauled it over to the mouth of the small canyon; it was probably the most difficult hundred meters I’ve ever traveled. The methane snow whipped around my helmet and visibility was so bad we lashed ourselves together with tether lines so even if we lost visual contact, we would still be physically linked. By the time we pulled the sled to the entrance, we were exhausted.

“We’ll leave it just inside the mouth of the gully,” I said. “We’ll have to carry the oxygen cylinders with us.”

I had taken charge, but to my surprise, nobody questioned that.

It was a tired Mercutio who asked, “How far?”

“A hundred meters more, maybe less. We’ll find them on a ledge overlooking a valley.”

“You’re sure of that?” Ophelia asked.

“No,” I said.

A few moments later we were struggling between the cliffs, the wind roaring overhead. There was less snow inside the gully and the going was easier. I hesitated where the gully split into left and right legs, unable to remember whether I had mentioned the split to Noah or not, then headed into the left leg, toward the valley. If they had chosen the other leg, we would have to backtrack. I prayed we would have time to investigate both.

The wind died and we pushed through the slush with only the occasional curse to break the radio silence. At one point I untied my tether line and ran over to a group of three snow-covered boulders, each the size and shape of a crouching man, in the center of the ravine. I frantically scraped away the layers of frozen methane only to discover brown, pitted rock.

Twenty minutes into the gully, the canyon walls faded away. Directly ahead was the valley. Once again, the wind obligingly brushed aside the fog and I saw the methane river plunging over the distant rim. I also saw three crumpled figures clustered together on the ledge, looking nothing like three boulders but very much like three space-suited crewmen who had fallen and been covered by the drifts. Abel was in the lead and reached them first, moving remarkably fast for an exhausted fat man. He brushed away the snow that covered their suits,then sank down beside them. I expected him to report over his helmet phone but he said nothing at all.

The rest of us slogged up as fast as we could. The first body I looked at was Heron’s. His faceplate was partly fogged over, but I could make out his eyes tightly closed and his mouth half open. He had smothered in his own vomit.

Noah and Tybalt had chosen a faster way to die. They had opened their faceplates to let in the cold and the poisonous atmosphere. Their cheeks were ice, their eyes chilled steel. I started shivering and couldn’t stop. I had never seen a dead man before—the closest I had come wasJudah , when Crow and I visited Reduction.

I couldn’t focus my thoughts. I wondered if Noah had liked the view, or if the fog had even cleared so he could see it. Or if Tybalt had finally realized the monsters of his imagination couldn’t compare to the real ones back on the
Astron.

I glanced at the time indicator inside my helmet. They should’ve had enough air for at least another fifteen minutes—with shallow breathing and minimum exertion, maybe a good half hour. It was Abel who checked their gauges. His voice in my headset was bitter.

“They were sent down with half tanks. No one could have reached them in time.”

Which meant that all the while I had been talking to the Captain, he had known they were dead.

****

He was waiting for me when we came back, floating by the huge port with Outside just beyond. Banquo nodded at me but made no effort to stop me or even make sure I announced myself. Escalus managed to makehimself more inconspicuous than usual, though I knew the little man heard and saw everything. The Captain turned away from the port and stared at me. I stared back in silence, failing to find the words that would express how I felt without giving myself away. He spoke first.

“Congratulations on recovering the mass, Sparrow. You were right, we’ll need it.”

Mass.

“They were dead,” I said. “They had air for only two hours.”

I had almost forgotten that I was “Sparrow,” the young technician who once had idolized him. He raised his eyebrows in mock surprise.

“I didn’t know that was a concern of yours. You said you were interested in saving mass and trace elements. It was a practical argument.” He shrugged. “I’ll check to see who issued the equipment; they’ll be punished. I wouldn’t have denied them two more hours of life.”

He was lying, I knew it. He had known about the tanks all along.

“They could have served the ship.” My voice cracked with anger.

“Oh? You attended the trials, you know the charges,you heard the verdicts.” He was suddenly suspicious. “You didn’t think that stranding them was humane.”

“You didn’t see them,” I said.

His expression softened. It took a moment to realize I had saved myself once again. I was outraged, but he expected that “Sparrow” would be outraged. If I hadn’t been, I would have been flatlined the next time period.

“I’ve seen dead people before, Sparrow. It isn’t a question of pretty or ugly, it just is.”

“Did you really think Noah posed a threat?” I asked.

He turned back to the port, lost for a moment in the view.

“We’re going into the Dark, Sparrow. I would be a fool if I thought that everybody wanted to go. But not because they want to return home—that was Noah’s mistake. Home is here, it’s the
Astron.
They’re afraid to go into the Dark because it’s new, because it’s different, because they don’t think the ship will make it. But the ship
will
make it. And so will a crew. Nobody’s going to die because we’re going into the Dark.”

A
crew.At first, I didn’t pay much attention to his choice of words.

“ Tybaltwas innocent,” I said bitterly.

He nodded.

“It hurt to lose him. But Ophelia isn’t innocent and neither are a number of others. Perhaps they should all have been tried.And condemned. I chose Tybalt . Not because he was guilty but because he was innocent. I couldn’t have tried all the conspirators. To have tried one who was actually guilty would have deterred a few, made them more cautious. To try and condemn a man everybody knew was innocent would deter a lot more.”

He wanted to keep everybody in line.Including me—if I ever thought of joining the mutiny.

“Sometimes a warning is more important than justice, Sparrow.”

“The crew will hate you,” I warned.

He floated back to his hammock, where he made himself comfortable.

“This crew, perhaps,” he said easily. “Maybe even a few in the next crew. But to the crew after that and all those that follow, Tybalt’s death will be history, no more important in the long run than his life.Or anybody’s life. Every three generations, God clears the stage for a new cast of actors, Sparrow.”

Huldahhad said thecrew were mayflies to him. I had to remember that. I turned to go and he said, “You also forget something else.”

I paused at the hatch. “What?” I loaded it with all the insolence I could muster. “Sparrow” wasn’t going to forget Tybalt and Noah.

“Death buys a privilege that everybody eagerly seeks, especially those who overvalue living. There’s room for new life on board.” He let it hang there for a moment to give me time to realize just what he was saying. “Every man wants to father children and every woman wants to be a mother—it’s built into the genes.” He smiled cynically. “You might qualify for a chance at creating new life, Sparrow.”

“I’d appreciate the opportunity, sir,” I said stiffly and left. I suspected I was as sterile as Ophelia thought he was—and that he knew it. The only thing the offer meant to me was that he had decided to tolerate

“Sparrow” a while longer.

I went back to my compartment and flicked on the falsie to surround myself with books and soft music. Snipe was on shift and I was glad to be alone.

A
crew, the Captain had said, not
the
crew. I thought of the two empty cylinders that were a part of the
Astron
and the “dream” I’d had when I was a member of the fifth generation and the crew was three times as large. With the passing of the generations, the Captain had been slowly cannibalizing the ship. Now I realized he had been cannibalizing the crew as well. The ship was not quite a self-contained environment; there was a slow but gradual leakage of everything important for the maintenance of life. Every generation there would be fewer and fewer of us until finally there would be nobody left to return to the ancientkingdomofSpain . But that didn’t really matter to the Captain. It was then I finally joined the mutiny.

In a week, the Aquinas system was far behind; we watched and worried as the constellations slowly swung around in the sky: There was nothing but blackness ahead of the
Astron
now, while the glittering diamond dust of the stars shifted to our sides and rear. We were heading into the Dark and none of us knew how many generations it would take to cross it—or if we ever would. I knew I was being watched, and not in my role as an icon for the crew. Unfortunately, everybody I knew in the mutiny was being watched as well. The Captain had known about Ophelia, which hardly surprised me, but he had also known about Snipe, Crow, Loon, and… who else? I thought of the “safe”

compartment and wondered if the peep screen had been repaired, then decided it hadn’t. Spare parts were in short supply and so ancient that most of them malfunctioned at the first opportunity. But the Captain didn’t needpeep screens so long as he had informers. I guessed that there were a lot of them and that the would-be mutineers had been too naive about who they recruited or even approached. It was easier to get together with Crow and the others than I thought. When we were alone, we exchanged a look or a nod and murmured atime, and half a dozen shifts after changing course we were sitting around an imaginary fire listening to the howls of imaginary wolves. We didn’t dog down the hatch—it would have been too obvious and it wasn’t necessary. The shadow screens cut most of the sound as well as the light. But once inside and safe, we sat warming ourselves by the simulated flames and staring at each other in silence. Why should I assume that none of
them
were informers? I wondered. After all, the Captain would have his rewards as well as his punishments. But Crow and Loon were my best friends and Ophelia could have had me flatlined long ago…